Cascade Lake-X has a new set of hardware mitigations for side-channel attacks (including some which are not hardware-mitigated on AMD architectures, specificall

Cascade Lake-X has a new set of hardware mitigations for side-channel attacks (including some which are not hardware-mitigated on AMD architectures, specifically Spectre v2 - AMD claims they are "difficult to exploit" but still enables software mitigations). Regardless, Firestrike Physics is not a benchmark that is substantially affected by mitigations. End-user tasks in general are not affected very strongly, generally ~1-3%, up to 5% in some cases. Phoronix tested across a spectrum of workstation tasks (not gaming) and found a geomean of about 12% performance impact for Intel and 4.5% for AMD. Linked earlier, here again: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=3900x-9900k-mitigations&num=8 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=3900x-99... Generally, server tasks are hit hardest because they involve lots of context switching. Gaming is typically not affected much at all. Workstation tasks fall somewhere in the middle.